Rob Kelley here, thinking this week about the origins of our stories, but less “where do your stories come from?” and more “why the hell would you write about that awful stuff?” (I have a very dear friend, a kind, gentle soul, who has cheered on my publishing journey, but who has told me in no uncertain terms: I love you, but there is no way I will ever read your book. Ever.)

Credit: NOAA

I learned recently about the deeply unfortunate predicament of a professional acquaintance. They had given up a big job to take on an even bigger one in a different city, uprooting their family for the opportunity, only to land as a huge scandal erupted, positioning them as one of the poster children for the new company’s very public malfeasance. Wrong place, wrong time. Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, really. Just awful.

So what did I do? I sat down and feverishly outlined a plot of a new novel based on a similar tragedy.

Maybe this is how crime writers’ brains work. Humans tell stories to make sense of things. Mythologies tell stories of how the stars got in the sky, why the sun rises and sets, why hurricanes sweep whole villages away, why we have to die. Generally, why things happen, especially bad things.

Last Wednesday . . .

The human brain is a meaning-making machine. We look at a series of events and try to connect them, post hoc ergo propter hoc: after that because of that. Of course, sometimes those explanations are wrong. Hades captures Persephone but she eats pomegranate seeds in the underworld so must spend part of the year there, causing winter. (This year she seems to be hanging around a little longer than we might like.)

Of course, that’s the not the real explanation. It took millennia to develop the science and technology to observe the tilt of the earth’s axis and reason about its impact on solar radiation intensity. Hence, winter.

Crime writers make the most of that rationality to help guide a reader along a path of clues, misdirections, revelations, and realizations. It’s what our readers crave.

For me as a thriller writer, and I suspect crime writers in general, our books are also meaning-making machines. Not like we’re struggling to find the meaning of human existence (though sometimes we are), but we are working to bring order to chaos. Bad stuff happens to good people for no good reason. But we writers get to hijack that narrative and upgrade it: bad things happen to good people then good stuff happens: justice is served, the oppressor is overturned, the good guys and gals get their day in the sun, or, if not, we at least get to understand the reasons behind the bad stuff.

Although literary fiction needn’t follow this pattern, much of it does, and certainly most genre fiction does. The couple meets, sparks fly, but bad things intervene, then they struggle to get back together. A crime occurs and someone takes it on–an intrepid cop, detective, librarian, a symbologist, anyone really–and brings justice despite adversity. A bad thing happens and our hero is caught in a web of deceit with powerful forces arrayed against her until she finds help, courage, defiance, fights back and wins.

But when I share what I’m working on at the end of the day, gleefully recounting to Margot the absolutely awful thing I’ve invented to bedevil my protagonist or the horribly reprehensible thing I’ve realized my antagonist can unleash, I probably sound a bit evil (See my Mr. Burns impersonation from last month’s post!).

But the real joy for me in creating these impossibly dire and dark situations is the chance to create the inspiring character who is ultimately undaunted by them. To create the power to resist the really bad stuff that happens, to channel it into a form that shows that we can overcome adversity.

In short, we find bad things in the world and make them better. So, I’m not saying I’m not a terrible person for inventing all these horrors to unleash on my characters, I’m just saying I might not be.